. The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy—often in collective effort—the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems or electronic hardware (mostly digital electronics), to achieve novel and clever outcomes.[1] The act of engaging in activities (such as programming or other media.
. [2]) in a spirit of playfulness and exploration is termed hacking. However, the defining characteristic of a hacker is not the activities performed themselves (e.g. programming), but how it is done[3] and whether it is exciting and meaningful.[2] Activities of playful cleverness can be said to have "hack value" and therefore the term "hacks" came about,[3] with early examples including pranks at MIT done by students to demonstrate their technical aptitude and cleverness. The hacker culture originally emerged in academia in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Tech Model Railroad Club (TMR call)[4] and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.[5] Hacking originally involved entering restricted areas in a clever way without causing any major damage. Some famous
hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were placing of a campus police cruiser on the roof of the Great Dome and converting the Great Dome into R2-D2.[6]
Richard Stallman explains about hackers who program:
. What they had in common was mainly love of excellence and programming. They wanted to make their programs that they used be as good as they could. They also wanted to make them do neat things. They wanted to be able to do something in a more exciting way than anyone believed possible and show "Look how wonderful this is. I bet you didn't believe this could be done."[7]
. Hackers from this subculture tend to emphatically differentiate themselves from whom they pejoratively call "crackers"; those who are generally referred to by media and members of the general public using the term "hacker", and whose primary focus—be it to malign or for malevolent purposes —lies in exploiting weaknesses in computer security.[8]
Many of the values and tenets of the free and open source software movement stem from the hacker ethics that originated at MIT[17] and at the Homebrew Computer Club. The hacker ethics were chronicled by Steven Levy in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution[18] and in other texts in which Levy formulates and summarizes general hacker attitudes:
Access to computers-and anything that might teach you something about the way the world works-should be unlimited and t
All information should be free.
Hackers should be judged by their hacking,
Hacker ethics are concerned primarily with sharing, openness, collaboration, and engaging in the hands-on imperative.[18]
Linus Torvalds, one of the leaders of the open source movement (known primarily for developing the Linux kernel), has noted in the book The Hacker Ethic[19] that these principles have evolved from the known Protestant ethics and incorporates the spirits of capitalism, as introduced in the early 20th century by Max Weber.
Hack value is the notion used by hackers to express that something is worth doing or is interesting.[20] This is something that hackers often feel intuitively about a problem or solution.
An aspect of hack value is performing feats for the sake of showing that they can be done, even if others think it is difficult. Using things in a unique way outside their intended purpose is often perceived as having hack value. Examples are using a dot matrix impact printer to produce musical notes, using a flatbed scanner to take ultra-high-resolution photographs or using an optical mouse as barcode reader.
A solution or feat has "hack value" if it is done in a way that has finesse, cleverness or brilliance, which makes creativity an essential part of the meaning. For example, picking a difficult lock has hack value; smashing it does not. As another example, proving Formats Last Theorem by linking together most of modern mathematics has hack value; solving a combinatorial problem by exhaustively trying all possibilities does not. Hacking is not using the process of elimination to find a solution; it's the process of finding a clever solution to a problem.
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